I am still reproaching myself for not finding time to swim while I was there--the first place I'd researched in advance had changed hands and no longer had a day-pass arrangement, and by the time I figured out that the Tottenham Court Road Central YMCA was an even better option I kind of didn't have time to fit it in (I will swim there next time I'm in London though, it looked great--fifteen pounds for a day pass including pool and health club, plus some kind of week-long thing in the region of forty-five pounds--not cheap, but worth it). However I did have two very decent runs in Regent's Park. It is amazing how many fewer people run in London than in New York! Though of course this really isn't a "destination" park for runners, too small, you would only go there if you were living in the area & it's not a particularly residential neighborhood I suppose... Fortunately it is so easily findable from where I was staying on Gower Street that even my negative sense of direction couldn't get me lost....

NB Regent's Park as well as being altogether to my taste period-wise--those beautiful houses!--and full of childhood memories of feeding the ducks & eating ice lollies also makes me happy because of the Hundred and One Dalmations connection--you know, the Dearlys live in a little house by Regent's Park because Mr. Dearly is a financial genius and solved the problem of the national debt and earned a life-long exemption from income-tax and a free house to live in--needless to say if you have not read that novel in living memory I highly recommend it--and here's a chance to clear one of the other things that's been taking up space on my desk waiting for me to post, a wonderful passage from a very interesting book we read with the British history reading group a couple months ago, Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions.

Cohen writes well about Ambrose Heal of Heal's Furniture (also right round the corner from where I was staying) and the "modern tendencies" exhibitions he introduced, but here's the charming part, which sent me off to read a biography of Dodie Smith & contemplate her taste for dalmatians:

The best publicity of all, however, was the example provided by one of Heal's own employees. Long before she racked up successes with One Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith was the manager of Heal's toy department, and, as her diary reveals, Ambrose Heal's mistress. The success of her first play, Autumn Crocus, brought Smith a flat to suit her 'very decided ideas' about home decoration. Decorated entirely in black, white, and silver, the flat represented the very latest in stage-set modernism. Its walls were bare of pictures; the few ornaments allowed, black glass flower vases and silver candlesticks, fitted the bichromatic colour scheme. The reporters who visited her in the top-floor flat marvelled at the happy synchronicity between the woman-'a modern phenomenon'-and her dwelling. Hers was a 'flat without a past', a spare assemblage of modernist items purchased to suit the rooms, with no family heirlooms to spoil the effect. Each room (including the bathroom) had a telephone. In place of the ubiquitous Victorian aspidistra, Smith cultivated cacti, plants that 'in their obliging habits are suited to the long absences of their owners which are part of modern life'.

I had intended to offer a few thoughts on novel-reading while traveling, but I think I must put that in a separate post since this one's got so long, and instead give you a page of pictures scanned from Valerie Grove's excellent Dear Dodie: A Life of Dodie Smith (the decor in these ones isn't particularly modernist)...

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.